Wharfedale Diamond 225 loudspeaker

In the United Kingdom, the first seeds of perfectionism in audio separates were sown by Goodmans Industries, founded in 1925. Then, in 1930, Garrard (est. 1722) produced its first commercial gramophone. Shortly thereafter, England experienced the Great Slump, the British name for the worldwide catastrophe known in the US as the Great Depression. Near the beginning of this economic downturn, in 1932, Gilbert Briggs founded Wharfedale Wireless Worksand the first British "high-fidelity" audio amplifiers began being manufactured by H.J. Leak & Co. Ltd., founded by Harold Joseph Leak in 1934.

But British hi-fi didn't really pick up steam until after World War II, when Jim Rogers founded his loudspeaker company, Rogers International (1947), and Peter Walker established the Acoustical Manufacturing Co. Ltd., aka Quad (1949).

It wasn't until 1954 that rationing of gasoline and food ended in the UK. So, not surprisingly, the Brit-Fi flower didn't fully bloom until the first London Audio Fair, in 1956. This huge show attracted over 24,000 attendees and featured the first UK demonstration of stereo sound, the introduction of the Garrard 301 record player, and a preview of the world's first production electrostatic loudspeaker, the Quad ESL.

In the US, consumer hi-fi had begun in 1945, with the founding of Avery Fisher's Fisher Electronics. Paul W. Klipsch founded his loudspeaker company, Klipsch and Associates, in 1946, in Hope, Arkansas. Brook Industries introduced Lincoln Walsh's legendary 10C and 12A amplifiers in 1948. But unquestionably, the high-fidelity shot heard 'round the world was fired in 1952, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Edgar Villchur and Henry Kloss established Acoustic Research. AR's first "acoustic suspension" speakersthe AR1, AR2, and AR3ushered in a new era of handsome, living-roomfriendly designs that traded efficiency for the ability to play full-range from a small box with low levels of distortion (footnote 1).

In the UK in the 1950s, Wharfedale's corner speakers (with sand-filled baffles) and their flat-panel SFB/3 (1956) were mirroring Klipsch's successes in the US; but it was Peter Walker's Quad ESL (1957) that moved British hi-fi into the global market. While Walker's original electrostatic design remained in production until 1985, Gilbert Briggs sold Wharfedale in 1958. Briggs's engineering partner, Raymond Cooke, left Wharfedale to found KEF, in 1961. Since then, in the UK and US, perfectionist audio has followed parallel but different paths.

In the US, postwar hi-fi began by making loudspeakers smaller (AR, Advent, footnote 2), but since the 1980s, America being America, the drift has been toward an SUV-like mindset of bigger is better. US audiophiles now seem to favor bulky, heavily damped, glossy-lacquered, floorstanding speakers of low sensitivity and impedance, as well as the massive, high-powered amplifiers needed to drive them.

Meanwhile, the British have refined a more modest approach, favoring smaller, lighter, stand-mounted speakers with thin walls and natural wood finishes.

Wharfedale's newest Diamond model, the 225 ($449/pair), is a prototypical British loudspeaker.

Description
Wharfedale introduced its first Diamond model in 1981. Short and stoutalmost a cubeit was one of the best-selling audiophile speakers of all time. By comparison, the new Diamond 225 is tall and lean and deep, measuring 14" high by 7.7" wide by 10.3" deep. It has a 1" soft-dome tweeter, a 6.5" mid/woofer with a woven Kevlar cone, and a wood-veneered cabinet with a volume of 0.36 cubic feet. This reflex-loaded box has a "slot-loaded distributed port" that fires downward through a narrow reveal between the cabinet bottom and the Diamond's rubber-footed base. Overall, the 225 looks and feels considerably more expensive than its humble price suggests.

Call me a numpty or a sentimental old twit, but I still romanticize those good old days when little British companies were [cough cough] Little British companies in charming brick factories whose workers drove Morris Minors, rolled baccy, and spent their evenings in pubs drinking pints. But in 2017, Wharfedale is part of the International Audio Group (IAG), which also owns Quad, Mission, Castle, and a few others. Today's Wharfedale is a big-small company that produces in-house its own drivers, cabinets, and even wireall in China, where the speakers are also assembled.

Today, most affordable audio products are designed not by independent pioneer innovators such as Henry Kloss, Gilbert Briggs, and Peter Walker, but by seasoned audio-industry professionals. The design of the Wharfedale Diamond 225 was supervised by Peter Comeau, IAG's director of acoustic design. Before joining IAG, Comeau cofounded Heybrook (1978) and was a director of engineering at Mission Electronicstwo more UK companies with long histories of making quality loudspeakers.

Setup
Their down-firing ports made the Diamond 225s easy to place in my small listening room (13' long by 11' wide by 9' high). As I experimented with speaker positions and stand heights, I heard very few room-bounce colorations. In my room, the sweet spots for small speakers are about 27" from the front wall. That's where I put them, and I did my critical listening with the Diamonds sitting on both 24"- and 26"-high stands. Very early on, I switched from using single AudioQuest GO-4 speaker cables (a rich-sounding match) to biwiring the Wharfedales with AudioQuest's Type 4 cables. Both arrangements let the music flow easily and generated excellent piano tone, but I thought the Diamond 225s spoke more openly and transparently when biwiredwhich was how I did the rest of my listening.

Listening with the Line Magnetic LM-518
Gilbert Briggs described the reproduction of the sound of an acoustic piano as the "sternest test" of a loudspeaker. The best way I know to get acquainted with a new speaker is to use a familiar amplifier and play recordings of solo piano that I'm very familiar with and understand. As the Diamond 225s relaxed and began to sound broken in, I reached for a disc that I play frequently, one I treat like a pilgrimage site with a spring of healing water: the Pierian Recording Society's very first release, Claude Debussy: The Composer as Pianist (CD, Pierian 0001). This disc includes all of Debussy's known recordings: four acoustic recordings with soprano Mary Garden, made for the Gramophone and Typewriter Co. in Paris in 1904, and 14 piano-roll recordings made for M. Welte & Söhne Recording Piano Co. in Paris in 1913.

With the Diamond 225s driven by Line Magnetic's LM-518 IA integrated amplifier (22Wpc), Debussy's approach was easy to appreciate. Golliwog's Cake Walk, from his The Children's Corner, displayed highly sensuous, richly colored piano tones whose fleshed-out textures commingled with surprise-filled cadences that delighted my heart. The 225's ability to deliver the essential but subtle features of Debussy's art was extremely impressive for a speaker costing only $449/pair.

This is an exquisitely recorded production. Every bit of Debussy's poetic fingerings and soft-pedal expression captured on the paper Welte-Mignon rolls was "re-animated" on a carefully restored 1923 Feurich-Welte reproducing piano and recorded with a stereo pair of vintage Neumann KM 83 microphones. Through the Diamond 225s, Debussy's piano sound was larger than I expected, tangibly solid and surprisingly three-dimensional. To the Wharfedales' great credit and my pleasure, I enjoyed wooden hammers, metal strings, and some little sense of the piano's soundboard.

Listening with the First Watt J2
Forget cake walks and froufrou Parisian modernistsbring us now the timeless teen thrash and hard-raking boogie machine we call Metallica. If you can't get on and ride their explosive 1986 album, Master of Puppets (CD, Elektra 60439-2), I feel sorry for your cheesy lounge-singer soul. Metallica's guitar sounds and hyper-drivin', amped-up rhythms never fail to cut me through to the gut.

Footnote 1: See John Atkinson's discussion of efficiency vs sensitivity here. Sensitivity can be converted into efficiency, and vice versa, using this on-line calculator.

Footnote 2: That was the trend on the east coast, but to some west-coast companies, bigger was better, and remained so for years.

I recently bought a pair of Diamond 225's hoping to enjoy some trickle down performance from the Wharfedale Jade 3's....
http://www.stereophile.com/content/wharfedale-jade-3-loudspeaker#iFijTRLaTGgGLhb4.97

I was thoroughly impressed with every aspect of their performance and the perceived bass extension was unbelievable!
The knuckle wrap test seemed to indicate a very solid cabinet.
They seem like a great deal to me!

Wonderful review and tells me exactly what to expect from this speaker. Off topic from the speaker, I really liked this paragraph

"A mechanic can sharpen a file by soaking it in dilute acid. This procedure works well—up to a point. Eventually, the file's teeth get too sharp, and become all weak and pointy and bent over, like witches' teeth. That's what bad high-end audio (and a lot of re-mastered high-resolution digital) sounds like to me."

Having listened to some very expensive speakers that I despised and some hi res recordings that sound worse that redbook, this was reassuring that I am sane.

I will not deny that speaker designs using Kevlar drivers can achieve flat frequency response (the measurements prove it), and at least off axis or from another room sound quite wonderful. But sitting in front of the speakers and I myself have a problem with them, similar to the one Art Dudley experiences. It sounds to me as though a sawtooth or fuzzy texture is applied to all the instruments, midrange on down. This applies to B&W, Wharfedale, and Audioquest speakers among others and several of these I heard with their skins on and noticed the "hash" before the driver material was revealed.
After being made fun of by multiple parties over the years, both sales people and other listeners, I finally got to discuss the matter with somebody but completely got it, and his credentials simply cannot be argued with. It is Richard Vandersteen. He has studied speakers that flex partially out of phase as the driver moves backward and forward in a not quite pistonic manner. It was his opinion that Kevlar is entirely too flexible a material to use in this application.

You are however not the first person to ridicule others who observed something that you couldn't. Until new and unique ideas or observations are widely accepted, the few people who can find these characteristics are going to be ridiculed. We just have to roll with the punches.

Although I very much enjoyed your review Herb, you are a remarkable wordsmith, so much so, one can palpably imagine hearing the Diamonds as you did, however, like Dale, I too smirked at the thought you know Kevlar when you hear it......I'll take that bet and double it from " the next room ". With the Velveeta Raccoon damning the media for fake news whilst wearing a fake head with hair, I just can't let your assertion go unchallenged.

IMHO Herb is bang on with his assertion you can hear the audible fingerprint of the material a speaker cone Is made from. I've enjoyed having paper cones (AR3a), bextrene (Spendor BC1 and Chartwell Ls3/5a), metal (KEF LS50), polypropelene (various Spendors, ProAc), Kevlar (B&W, Wharfedale) with mixes of metal and silk dome tweeters in many combos of speakers. While I couldn't say I could detect the differences in another room, they cannot avoid resonating according to the physical properties of the material. It is no different to a luthier being able to identify with absolute certainty the resonant characteristic of different woods used in musical instruments. It would defy the laws of physics for any material to be wholly free from any native resonance. Why does this matter? Some materials resonate more musically and with less colouration. The snag is once you detect the recurring resonances, that's what you hear and it is hard to tune out. Personally, I found bextrene slows and thickens the sound with extra harmonics and lost detail, particularly when heavily doped. Metal dome tweeters, try as I might, tire my ears, while I quite happily put up with coarsened sibilances with silk domed tweeters because they sound more musically pleasing to my ears. Maybe Stereophile could conduct a definitive analysis, qualitative and technical?

Whoa daddy ...another remarkable wordsmith,easily on Herb's level in sensory suggestion by word organization. So Papa Max I'm guessing you're in on the wager and a double or nothing " next room "identifying of woofer material.

Listening is an art, and many people do not have the capacity for it. It is a deep practice. The same is true for speaking and communicating through the written word. Thank you Herb for this review and the post WWII audio manufacturing history lesson. I appreciate anyone that can help me navigate the world of tubes, transistors, and boxes. But I really am appreciative of the person that can entertain me and save me money at the same time.

I bought the 220's a year ago and I love them! I use a NAD 316BEE Amp with a NAD Phono Pre Amp a Debut Carbon Turntable. It's a modest set up, but it sounds sweet in my small apartment. After reading every review on them, and seeing how What HI FI rated them Bookshelf speaker of the year in 2014, I was sold. Beautiful sound.

The individual response curve for that bizarre looking tweeter, the horizontal and vertical dispersion plots, and to a certain extent the waterfall in the treble (11k to 14k) do not look very good, imo.

Well despite the measurement you speak of, these speakers sound great to my ears, and I've owned lots. The truth is in the actual listening. They are just so natural sounding with a hint of warmth. They lend their talents to a wide range of music, be it classical, jazz, or rock. The build quality at least on mine is super and they look lovely. I like them so much I bought a second pair in Rosewwood quilted. The first pair is the Walnut pearl. They come highly recommended and Stereophile's reviews are spot on! The best speakers at this price point I Have ever owned. I also own the 220's which are just as good, albeit with less in the base department, but still respectable amounts of base reproduction. I believe Wharfedale has knocked it out of the park on the new Diamonds! If they improve upon them in future revisions, Ill be there!

Just got a pair in white, they cost in denmark just a few pennies more than 100 eruros for one speaker, with free shipping both ways and 30 days to return them. They sound really good not classleding deep bass, but for they money they are above avarage in performance to price ratio.